Oh.

315 million reasons to build an internet following … Well done to the crew at Huffington Post. I guess.

Huffington Post Gets Bought by AOL for $315 Million

The Huffington Post has confirmed tonight that it has been acquired by AOL. According to a report by Kara Swisher, site-cofounder Arianna Huffington will become Editor in Chief of all AOL content.

That’s an incredibly bold move and a big bet of AOL’s remaining revenue streams on the future of content on the web. It’s hard to imagine a better bet in that direction. Huffington has demonstrated a clear ability to win at the bulk and low-cost content game. Somewhere in the discussion, the lawsuit about the Post’s founding has got to be pondered. The best place to watch discussion of this news will probably be media industry aggregator Mediagazer.

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An even better take on the ‘troubled marriage’ (!) HuffPo/AOL deal from Dan (Fake-Steve-Jobs) Lyons… making a clear distinction between ‘sales guys’ and journalists …

The other problem is that AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, is a sales guy. He ran sales at Google before he came to AOL in 2009. Nothing wrong with sales guys, except when they start telling people how to do journalism. Sales guys deal in numbers. But journalism is about words. Sales guys live in a world where everything can be measured and analyzed. Their version of journalism is to focus on things like “keyword density” and search-engine optimization.

Journalists live in a world of story-telling, and where the value of a story, its power to resonate, is something they know by instinct. Some people have better instincts than others. Some people can improve their instincts over time. The other part of storytelling is not the material itself but how you present it. Some can spin a better tale out of the same material than others.
But no great storyteller has ever been someone who started out by thinking about traffic numbers and search engine keywords.

Michael Arrington, who runs TechCrunch and just sold it to AOL a few months ago, is an abrasive, big-ego, sometimes obnoxious guy. He’s a friend of mine, so I mean this in the best possible way. But I can’t imagine him working for Arianna.

… Back in 2005, no self-respecting journalist would ever sink so low to chum the waters with such foul SEO bait. But thanks to Huffington, all self-respecting journalists—especially those who fear for their jobs—have abandoned those anxieties and are happy to chase Arianna’s SEO Speedwagon wherever it may go. They’ll even drive over inconvenient journalistic shibboleths that stand between them and their page-view destinations. Aping her, they’ll happily publish more copy daily—some of it marginal—than any human would want to read in a week or a month, as long as it harvests page views.

I’m not judging Huffington here as much as I’m describing her. Some of her innovations may make me squirm but—to paraphrase Samuel Johnson—nobody but a blockhead ever wrote a story that he didn’t want people to read. Like a good tabloid editor, Huffington (and Matt Drudge before her) knows what the masses want to read and how they want it packaged. How her SEO mastery will survive the rejigging of search-engine algorithms and imitations by competitors (like Slate and everybody else on the Web) is a question I’m not prescient enough to answer.

But this isn’t the first time “upmarket” journalists have followed “down-market” journalists or paid them the compliment of imitation. Adolph S. Ochs, who purchased the New York Times in 1896 and strove to maintain it as an “objective” and “respectable” newspaper, once extended high praise to the Ariannas of the day—the yellow journalists at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. While most old-media types in those days disparaged Pulitzer and Hearst, Ochs said in an 1899 interview:

Such papers as The World and The Journal exist because the public wants them. I hold that some of their features are open to criticism, but each of them has done infinitely more good than harm.